John Piper Good Quotes: Part 4

1. All quotes taken from sermons
2. All completely taken out of context
3. None found in the Online Sermon Texts – but many are on the videos

27 Witticisms From John Piper

As I was compiling these quotes, I noticed a slight theme. This year, a few of the quotes include a nonstandard word. In fact, I couldn’t use one of the quotes, because I couldn’t figure out how to spell the utterance he used. In any case, that’s what these first four quotes are.

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[On Pastor John’s Definition of being ‘Free’] You aren’t really fully free if you aren’t doing what you desire to. You say, “I can! I can muster up my will and I can do what I don’t want to do.” Yes, you can. You call that Freedom? I don’t. Bleah.

The word ‘Alone’ is added in the ESV, The word ‘Deemed’ is added in the Study Bible, I’ve written those folks, all my friends who translated this verse and said “Don’t do this to me! I have to preach on this! The fact that he said it the way that he said it accounts for their objection in verse 13. If you take out the problem from Chapter 5 verse 30 you can’t explain the problem that the Pharisees in chapter 8 verse 13!” So forgive me for being little bit CLK here.

I told Noel the other night how frustrating it is to preach through this gospel because when you’re starting verses like this you gotta slow down! And if I slow down I’ll never finish! So . . . we try to slow down a little and then Pssssh like this, y’know? So I’m doing a Pssssh tonight.

Some pastors say “I don’t want to get into specifics. We’ll just have a hazy unity.” I don’t want to have a hazy unity. Hazy unity feels . . . bleah.

If you asked, “Show us the Father”, and I said, “as long as I have been with you and you don’t know me?” you wouldn’t come back to this church. And you shouldn’t.

. . . So pretend like you’re in class for the next twenty minutes or so and we’ll close with preaching.

[About our church’s location] Can you survive the fact that if you can see the church, you can’t get to it? Yes, you can. . . Try it sometime! Try driving down 35W. There it is! Twenty minutes later you’re at our church.

I cannot imagine that it would be satisfying to become an itinerant conference speaker. Yuck.

No one sins out of duty: “I don’t want to sin, but I really should, so I will.”

For John, this was like he was writing in the 50’s. I’m 65. I remember the 50’s. I remember Elvis!

When I read things like this in the Bible they jar me. I really love to be jarred by the Bible.

If you haven’t been jarred when you’re reading the Bible, you’re not reading it.

I’ve told that story a hundred time and people always laugh. You almost didn’t laugh.

Some people are saying, when I think about Jesus’ love, I think about John 3:16. I don’t think about 11:5 [letting Lazarus die.]

Human brains get us into trouble a lot.

I listened to about 5 minutes of it. I couldn’t take it anymore.*

If you’re dead, you’re dead. You can’t undead yourself.

I think I get it [I can explain this complex text (John 9:40-41)]. But you’re going to have to help me. You’re going to have to not think about what you’re going to be doing in an hour. You will be lost.

There’s only one kind of sheep. Mangy sheep.

If you say ‘I don’t have anything to give [in a small group]’, that’s blasphemy. . . not to overstate it.

I’m not saying it’s going to be easy. I don’t have any promises about ease, except: It gets worse. I DO have huge promises about joy.

There are those who think, “I don’t give a rip about mixed metaphors. If you’re a door and a shepherd, tell me about it!”

We are little children. Little children don’t know all they need to know, but they really sleep well.

* The newest contemporary Christian music song? No, he’s talking about the tape from the first time he preached from John 16:16-24

14 comments

Oh man thanks.This was good. I’ve collected quite a few of these “Piperisms” myself.

Perhaps this one is in your archives. It’s from a sermon in ’07:

Judas is not incredible anymore. I just want to quit sometimes. So much reproach is brought on the ministry. I hate the prosperity gospel. I hate the use of money. Sometimes I just want to strip myself bare of everything and be like Francis of Assisi and go naked into the wilderness. Less there be any thought that I give a rip about what money means. So pray for me in that regard (laughter). Not that I won’t have my rear end showing someday, but that I won’t fall.

As I watched the video. Another good one from a talk he gave at Driscoll’s church:

“I get fed up with hearing so much non-Bible…I hear “Oh well we believe that… that’s foundational…” Well, get it out of the foundation and put it in the kitchen. Nobody remodels the cement blocks of their basement. People are worried about…the kitchen…they live up there. They don’t give a rip about what the foundation looks like…So I’m not impressed by that answer…
These glorious truths in the Bible are not there to be hidden in the basement while you talk about other things.

In his message at the Desiring God conference in Lake Forest, he said “The universe—God just did it with his twinkie… pinky.”

And at the resolved conference message “The Triumph of the Gospel in the New Heavens and New Earth” he said, “In heaven, we’ll eat Pizza! And, it will be TOTALLY healthy!… If you don’t like pizza, there will be fish.”

[…] Now that the vote is in and Pastor Jason is being called to be our new pastor (with 99% affirming the call), I have compiled the amusing quotes from Pastor Meyer’s season of candidating and posted them here. I will note two things that are different from the quotes that I’ve previously posted for Pastor John: […]